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November 2016 |
Francis Schlatter, The Healer |
By Shannon Wagers |
He mysteriously disappeared after |
The physical and cultural landscape of the Land of
Enchantment has long held an allure for religious visionaries and spiritual seekers of every stripe. One of the most remarkable of these was Francis Schlatter, a mystic of Christ-like appearance, known as“ The Healer,” or in
Spanish, El Sanador. He arrived here in 1895, clad in a coarse woolen robe and walking barefoot.
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reportedly curing hundreds of New
Mexicans of maladies ranging from backaches to blindness.
Although Schlatter was an enigma, the facts of his life are well-documented.
He was born in 1856 to German parents in the French province of
Alsace-Lorraine, near the German border. At 14 he left school to learn the trade of shoemaking, and around 1884, emigrated to
America, where he continued to
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NEW MEXICO’ S HOUSE OF HOPE
support himself as a cobbler. In 1892, he settled in Denver and opened a shoe-repair shop. It was apparently at around this time that Schlatter, a lifelong Catholic, began to feel the pull of a higher calling.
Leaving Denver on foot with only three dollars in his pocket, he embarked on the journey that would consume the rest of his life, crisscrossing the Southwest from Colorado to Kansas to Texas, across the desert to California, then back again to New Mexico, and finally south into Mexico. He claimed to have no destination, but simply went wherever God, whom he always referred to as“ The Father” or“ The Master,” directed him. Only after a year of wandering did he begin to exercise the special gift of spiritual healing that he seemed to possess.
As he made his way north along the Río Grande toward Albuquerque in the summer of 1895, his reputation grew. At Los Lunas, Peralta, Pajarito and Isleta Pueblo, ever larger crowds surrounded him. He clasped their hands and prayed with them, and they went away, if not immediately cured of their afflictions, at least assured that they would get better if their faith remained strong. He refused to accept money for his
PRIME TIME
services, insisting that it was not he, but The Father, who healed.
He reached Albuquerque on July 20 and remained there about a month. Thousands of people from the city and the surrounding countryside came to see him and to be healed. Reporters interviewed him. The Grunsfeld Brothers mercantile store presented him with a new suit of clothes to replace his tattered robes.
Some of his followers believed that Schlatter was in fact Jesus Christ and that his reappearance on earth was a sign that the End Times were near. Schlatter may have believed that himself. He made no effort to deny it, and with his long, flowing brown hair and beard, and pale, penetrating eyes, he certainly looked the part. He carried with him a curious object- a rod of solid copper, about as long as a baseball bat, from which in some mysterious way he derived his spiritual strength, or so he claimed.
There were skeptics, of course. Several prominent Albuquerque residents denounced him as a fraud. Attorney William A. Keleher, in his memoirs, described taking his younger brother, lame in one leg from polio, to be touched by the Healer. The boy’ s condition did not
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1966-2016
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